Monster

Hirokazu Kore-eda's newest film, Monster, has hands down some of the best usage of The Rashomon effect and maybe two of the best performances by child actors I've ever seen. Apart from that, the screenplay is so sincere and wonderfully gives insane amounts of scope to a rather ordinary story without getting ridiculous or overly sentimental. Then there's the achingly beautiful score by the master, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who sadly passed away soon after finishing the score for this film. Also in Monster there are many all-time-great shots, for example the shot where raindrops raining down to mud creates an image that looks like a starry sky or the one I have as my backdrop for this film. Along my cinema journey I've realized that one of my favorite type of a film is where the characters struggle internally. And often that is caused by their inability to convey their emotions and thoughts to other human beings. So far I think that Ryusuke Hamaguchi's, Happy Hour, has best explored this complexity of human interaction. Another phenomena I would like more films to explore is a situation where there's clearly an unfortunate set of events on display that, at first, makes many of the characters' behavior seem evil until they're fleshed out and in reality were doing the right things, at least from their own set of circumstances. Again I'm praising Hamaguchi for exploring this so well in his latest film Evil Does Not Exist. Both of these ideas expressed in these two paragraphs nicely emerge in Monster. At this point it's beginning to seem as if I want to talk about Hamaguchi instead of this film's director, Kore-eda. And while Hamaguchi has been exploring these wonderful ideas that really align with my interests, I'm certain that if I were to go through both of these directors' filmographies, I would find Kore-eda's work more impressive and varied. Although Hamaguchi has more years ahead of him and is only going to improve as he gets older and makes more films. That being said, right now these two wonderful fellas are my favorite working directors even though I've only seen a fraction of their work.